Monday, 29 October 2018

How Life Has Value, Even Absent Overarching Purpose

Wherein lies value?

Posted
by Keith Tidman

Among
the most-common questions from philosophy is, ‘What is the purpose of life?’ After all, as
Plato pithily said, humans are ‘beings in search of meaning’. But what might
be the real reason for the question about the purpose of life? I suggest that what
fundamentally lurks behind this age-old head-scratcher is an alternative query: Might not life still have value, even if there is no sublimely overarching purpose? So, instead, let’s
start with ‘purpose’ and only then work our way to ‘value’.

Is an individual's existence best understood scientifically —
more particularly, in biological terms? The purpose of biological
life, in strictly scientific terms, might be reduced to survival and passing
along genes — to propagate, for continuation of the familial line and (largely
unconsciously) the species. More broadly, scientists have typically steered
clear of deducing ‘higher purpose’ and are more comfortable restricting themselves to explanations of
empirically, rationally grounded physical models — however inspiring those
peeks into presumed reality may be — that relate to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of
existence. The list is familiar:

the heliocentric construct of Copernicus and the mechanistic universes of René Descartes and Isaac
Newton

the Darwinian theories of evolution and natural selection

the laws of thermodynamics and the theory of general relativity of Albert
Einstein

But grand as these theories are, they still don’t provide us with purpose.

Rather, such theories focus on better understanding the
emergence and evolution of the cosmos and humankind, in all their wonder and
complexity. The (not uncommonly murky) initial conditions and necessary
parameters to make intelligent life possible add a challenge to relying on
conclusions from the models. As to this point about believability and deductions
drawn, David Hume weighed in during the 18th century, advising, ‘A
wise man proportions his belief to the evidence’.Meanwhile, modern physics doesn’t
yet rule in or rule out some transcendent, otherworldly dimension of the
universe — disproof is always tough, as we know, and thus the problem is perhaps unanswerable — but the physical–spiritual dualism implied by such an ethereal dimension
is extraordinarily questionable. Yet one cannot deduce meaning or purpose,
exceptional or ordinary, simply from mere wonder and complexity; the latter are
not enough. Suggested social science insights — about such things as
interactions among people, examining behaviours and means to optimise social constructs
— arguably add only a pixel here and a pixel there to the larger picture of
life’s quintessential meaning.

Religious
belief —
from the perspectives of revelation, enlightenment, and doctrine — is an obvious place
to turn to next in this discussion. Theists start with a conviciton that God
exists — and conclude that it was God who therefore planted the human species amidst the rest
of His creation of the vast universe. In this way, God grants humankind
an exalted overarching purpose. In no-nonsense fashion, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza took the point to another declarative
level, writing:

‘Whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be
conceived’.

This kind of presumed God-given plan or purpose seems to instill
in humankind an inspirational level of exceptionalism. This
exceptionalism in turn leads human beings toward such grand purposes as undiminished love toward
and worship of God, fruitful procreation, and dominion over the Earth (with all the environmental repercussions of that dominion), among other things. These purposes include an
implied contract of adding value to the world, within one’s
abilities, as prescribed by religious tenets.

One takeaway may be a comfortable feeling that humankind, and each member of our
species, has meaning — and, in a soul-based model, a roadmap for redemption, perhaps to an eternal afterlife. As to that, in the mid-20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in characteristically
unsparing fashion:

‘Life has no meaning the moment you lose the
illusion of being eternal’.

Universes constructed around a belief in God, thereby, attempt to allay the dread of mortality and
the terror of dying and of death. Yet, even where God is the prime mover of everything, is it unreasonable to conceive of humankind as perhaps still lacking any
lofty purpose, after all? Might, for example, humankind share the universe with
other brainy species on our own planet — or even much brainier ones cosmically farther flung?

Because if humankind has no majestically overarching purpose — or put another way, even if existentially it
might not materially matter to the cosmos if the human species happened to tip into
extinction — we can, crucially, still have value. Ultimately value, not exceptionalism or eternity, is what
matters. There’s an important difference
between ‘purpose’ — an exalted reason that soars orders of magnitude above
ordinary explanations of why we’re riding the rollercoaster of creation — and ‘value’, which for an individual might only need a benevolent role in continuously improving the lot of humankind, or perhaps other animals and the ecosphere. It may come through empathically good acts without the expectation of any manner of reward.
Socrates hewed close to those principles, succinctly pointing out, ‘Not life,
but a good life, is to be chiefly valued’.

Value,
then, is anchored to our serving as playwrights scribbling, if you will, on pieces of paper how our individual, familial, community, and global destiny unfolds into
the future. And what the quality of that future is, writ large. At minimum, we have value based on humanistic grounds: people
striving for natural, reciprocal connections, to achieve hope and a range of benefits
— the well-being of all — and disposing of conceits to instead embrace our
interdependence in order not only to survive but, better, to thrive. This defines the intrinsic nature of ‘value’; and perhaps it is to this that we owe our humanity.

6 comments:

Aristotle considered that meaning has to do with 'the whole aim and end of human existence'. The trouble with smaller meanings is that nothing lies beyond them. They are satisfactory only within a limited context. I see various problems there.

There has been much debate as to whether or to what extent theism has had 'environmental repercussions', whatever might be meant by this above. The Torah, for instance, has been seen as a blueprint for environmental sustainability.

Not only. Someone said that 'meaning is more'. This seems to me to be what Aristotle implied. It is about the 'whole' -- it is always more than you have got.

I think there are two great dangers in 'my own meaning' -- a meaning about which Thomas Nagel said, 'Perhaps the trick is to keep your eyes on what's in front of you.' Such meaning can fail, not seldom catastrophically. But it may also open the temptation to 'more'. Offer people a larger meaning, say Kultur, and they too easily jump ship for that larger meaning.

“[I]t may also open the temptation to ‘more’. Offer people a larger meaning, say Kultur, and they too easily jump ship for that larger meaning.” I wonder, though, if the “jumping of ship for that larger meaning” is too often done out of quiet desperation. Life absent a transcendental purpose — such lofty purpose, we might convince ourselves, ‘divinely’ justifies humankind’s existence — can, for some, be terrifying. Just as terrifying might be fear of death absent the promise of eternity — some variant of eternity handily filling in the gap left by the concomitant fear of incompleteness in life and of the shaky underpinnings of our species’ presumptuous exceptionalism. All in all, thereby, I’m not sure the mass ‘jumping of ship’ has historically been a good arbiter or metric of wise decision-making regarding life’s higher-order matters. As I propose in my brief essay, ‘value’ (with humankind’s welfare at the epicenter) can be satisfyingly sought in less otherworldly ways.

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